WE ARE in the throes of Homecoming Year, pegged on the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns.
That much is certain, and a good job too, because the Battlefield Band, those seasoned folk troubadours who take the stage this Saturday and Sunday at The Gathering, the international clan jamboree which is a Homecoming highlight, are having difficulty establishing whether or not it's their 40th.
The band will share the bill in Holyrood Park with other folk luminaries, such as Capercaillie and the Red Hot Chilli Pipers. In the meantime, we are seated round the kitchen table of the converted kirk in the Midlothian village of Temple, which serves as home and recording studio to their long-standing manager, Robin Morton, and his harpist and glass engraver wife, Alison Kinnaird. Morton is perfectly sure that this is the 30th anniversary of his label, Temple Records, but as for that label's flagship act…
According to their website, their "Milestone Tour" of Germany, France and Switzerland next January celebrates their 40th birthday, but the band's remaining founder member, singer and keyboard player, Alan Reid, insists otherwise: "I started at the beginning of '69… or maybe it was '68. Brian (MacNeill, the group's co-founder] had a trio who had a residency in Glasgow pub, the Iron Horse, and one Friday they discovered their instruments had been locked in a room in Strathclyde University and the janny had gone home. They had to go down to the Iron Horse and say, 'Sorry we cannae play tonight', and they were fired. That was the end of that line-up, and I joined the next week.
"I gave up teaching in 1975 and said that I'd try music for two years," adds Reid, now 59. "I think I'll hang on till I'm 90, then see what happens."
There is laughter from current colleagues Mike Katz, the band's Los Angeles-born piper with the ZZ Top beard who has been with the group since 1997, Alasdair White, from Lewis, their fiddler for the past eight years and, their most recent recruit, singer- guitarist Sean O'Donnell, from Derry.
The band has metamorphosed continually since that bunch of amateurs lost their pub gig four decades ago, in the process pioneering the combination of Highland pipes, fiddles and keyboards and become one of the best-known acts on the global "Celtic music" circuit. There is a distinct piquancy in their playing at home for these global clansmen: usually it is Battlefield who take their exuberant stage show to the Scottish diaspora and others, from Anchorage to Beijing.
The band's 1980 album Home Is Where the Van Is was celebrated in a "Classic Album" concert during this year's Celtic Connections, with the present line-up joined by veterans of that album, including piper Duncan MacGillivray and founder fiddler Brian McNeill, who left in 1990 to pursue a solo career and later became the first Head of Scottish Music at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. The piper who succeeded MacGillivray, Dougie Pincock, also ended up in an academic post and is currently director of the National Centre of Excellence in Traditional Music in Plockton. Other notable members have included singer-songwriters Karine Polwart and the late Davy Steele, and fiddler John McCusker, who replaced McNeill while barely out of short trousers and is now a ubiquitous presence on the folk scene and beyond.
"People say, 'Oh, the Battlefield Band's changed its line-up again'," argues Morton. "Well, we keep going by changing the line-up. Other bands break up."
But maintaining this folk institution involves lengthy stints out of the country, a business that Morton describes as "a kind of socially acceptable form of irresponsibility. Like being a student again."
As we talk, "the Batties" are at Temple recording their latest album – "27th… 28th?" ponders Reid. Due for release in September, it's called Zama Zama – Try Your Luck, a sardonic reference to the deaths of more than 80 illicit miners – "Zama-Zamas" – in South Africa in June, and its core theme is the pursuit of wealth, a moot topic in a world still reeling from catastrophically cavalier banking.
Morton established Temple Records in 1979, while still player-manager with the Boys of the Lough, ostensibly to make a landmark recording by his wife, Alison Kinnaird, at a time when established London-based folk labels for whom he was producing wouldn't touch a harp record.
But he was also producing Battlefield for the Topic label, and the band asked him to manage them. "I said, 'No thanks'. But I thought they were a really great band, so I eventually agreed."
Morton, a voluble and dynamic Ulsterman who came to Edinburgh as a student, is proud of Temple's groundbreaking ventures, such as that first album of his wife's, The Harp Key – "Now you're tripping over bloody harps" – or the Controversy of Pipers album, or his early recording of the Gaelic singer Christine Primrose. "We were ahead of the game on a lot of things."
Last year saw him inducted into the Scottish Traditional Music Hall of Fame for his industrious nurturing of the music he loves. A one-time chairman of the Scottish Record Industry Association, he describes the industry these days as "a bit of a nightmare. Thank God I'm not trying to sell a record label now."
"It's hard to stop, though," he says resignedly as he and the band prepare to resume recording that twenty-somethingth album. "What are you going to do – pass over on all that great music?"
• For further information, see
www.templerecords.co.uk/newwebsite and
www.battlefieldband.co.uk